Demographic Transition in China

This book documents and analyzes fertility and demographic trends in China since the early 1950s, focusing particularly on previously undocumented provincial and rural-urban diversities; it also analyzes China's current reform on population control, and considers future developments.

Previous investigations of fertility transitions in the People's Republic of China have almost all been carried out at national level.

The author of this book, however, is a Chinese citizen and has had access to local data not available to foreign researchers.

He has thus been able to document trends on the provincial and regional levels.

He has found important regional patterns by which features of the fertility transition diffused across the country from urban to rural areas, and from the eastern to the interior provinces.

He describes these patterns and goes on to discuss their possible causes.

The book reviews the evolution of China's family planning programme and assesses the local performance of population control at different time periods. The relationship between fertility trends and socio-economic conditions is examined and a qualitative study is made of the effects of institutions of fertility differentials.